


This kingdom by the sea

by Anothertroy



Category: 20th Century CE RPF, Artists RPF, Literary RPF, Real Person Fiction
Genre: Deep-Seated Psychological Issues, First Love, M/M, nobody is okay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 13:04:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20967029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anothertroy/pseuds/Anothertroy
Summary: I was a child and she was a child,In this kingdom by the sea,But we loved with a love that was more than loveI and my Annabel Leetwo strange young creatures meet at art school and fall in love. meanwhile, twenty years later, an artist waiting to go to war is haunted by memories.





	This kingdom by the sea

**Author's Note:**

> there is not enough written about either of these beautiful, weird, darling people and I can't contain all my feelings and idk I guess this is just...how I roll, I show up every n years to write something unfinished and post it on ao3 and disappear again. I don't know. I can't bear that they were just really in love in real life and nobody cares so I'm writing this because otherwise I'm going to actually write a real human academically-researched book about it and upset people, probably.
> 
> please talk to me about these children I so desperately need people to care
> 
> Stephen went by 'Napier' when he arrived at the Slade school so he could be taken more seriously as an artist (god, I know) and this keeps me up at night

_1942_

_what are you drawing?_ he remembers Stephen's voice - Napier's voice, back then - as it always was; arch, curious, perpetually holding the sheer lightness of a life lived, for the most part, in the sun. the sound of his own voice in answer is far less clear, a blurred photograph, a bad line. _well, I think I've drawn you._

here, now, three years deep into the war, it should all seem damnably far away. he watches his hand move, the pencil dancing across what passes for paper these days. the familiar lines of his own vision, the comforting immediacy of his own talent, still blazing away in the dark - the dark of winter and the dark of everything else. instead, the memories are a constant companion. _whatever you know now_, he thinks, looking down at his uniform, _you never knew Napier._

*

_1922_

"You _have_, haven't you!" Napier puts a hand to his chest, a silent-film gesture. "_Haven't_ you? I'm quite dead, I see." Rex's laughter is a little embarrassed and perhaps rather pleased, and he touches the edge of the paper, barely moving it so that Napier might see it better; it's a divine likeness, his own exquisite face made paler and more perfect, a dream. "Do you like it?" Rex asks, sounding truly as though he wants to know. "Like it? I shall have it as my calling-card. Rex," he says in delight, hearing the glint of gold in his own voice and leaning into it, a siren's cry, "You _can't_ know how happy you've made me."

Rex gives him that look - the look people give him, because they've never seen anything like him, _what is this, what are you_, but he smiles, crooked and glad. "Then you must tell me."

-

life drawing, as it turns out, disturbs him utterly. not so much the nakedness, but the dispassion of it all; their models are blithe, bored and unconcerned - it makes it grotesque, somehow, causes him to think of ugly things uncovered. _Les Fleurs du mal_, but right there in the class, to the sound of the students' scratching against paper. "Like being in an asylum," he tells Rex over dinner, "I shan't go back. Not ever."  
"Then what will you do?" it sounds diffident - Rex always sounds diffident - but they both know that those who visibly neglect their studies are given short shrift by the Slade's teachers.  
"I haven't yet decided. Perhaps I was sent here to be your muse all along," he lifts his shoulders a little, affecting a shrug without truly doing anything so effortful, "Though I _shall_ be an artist, all the same."

-

walking along the river, Rex speaks of its ancient, grey beauty and the vertiginous thrill of knowing that young men like himself have cast their eyes and their hearts upon its waters for so many hundreds of years. "I could be anyone," he says, sounding both entranced and afraid by the idea.   
"And I?"  
Rex laughs, soft in the winter wind. "No, I don't believe you could be anyone but yourself."  
"Then I must be immortal," Napier points out, laying a gloved hand on his arm for balance, "I must follow you back through history, or you would be all alone, whoever you were."  
"Oh, quite immortal. I immortalise you daily."

giddiness overcomes Napier for a moment at the truth of it. the endless sketches, pages and pages of portraits, dashed off in mad moments - himself as all manner of creatures; a fairy princess, a cruel ghost, here a dazzling actress, a lovely corpse, and Shelley, their sometime favourite Romantic. sketches he has often looked over and thought, _one day the world will know how beautiful I am_, but in this frost-lined evening light, the thought hangs in the air before him like the mist of their breath: _one day the world will know how beautiful you find me_.

-

the poem was half a joke, at first - and a gift, Rex offering it from memory, a glimpse into, as he said, his own soul. "How _dark_," Napier had been amused, though not shocked; his own youthful reading had left him with a matching love for those stories of spectres and spirits of which Poe was an undoubted master. together they had made much of _my darling - my darling - my life and my bride_, striking attitudes across the table and startling a few of the other students, though for the most part everyone had become quite used to them by now. 

but later, Rex is speaking again of a favourite book of his - de la Mare's odd and unpopular _Henry Brocken_, whose titular character sets off on a remarkable journey through English literature, meeting its heroes and heroines along the way. Napier has not read it, and he feels he was not adequately listening the last time, having evidently missed some of the details. "But how does he _get_ there?"  
"On Rosinante. On his horse."  
"But how does the horse know where to go?"  
"Well, it's all _magic_." he sounds affronted, cross like a child, which Napier finds unbearably charming, resolving to madden him at every turn, for ever. "Oh, _magic_," he says dismissively, and waits for Rex to look at him aghast before allowing himself to betray his teasing, eyes full of laughter. "Do go on. Do, I love it, really."

"Well," says Rex, a little thrown, "I do wish it would have seen a greater success. I should like to illustrate a reprint of it. I have already drawn Brocken," he opens his sketchbook, long fingers brushing against the smudged paper; the young man on the page is inward-looking, windswept, unmistakably a self-portrait. and brilliant, of course. "If I didn't like you so much," Napier says truthfully, waspish, "Everything you draw would make me _green_."  
"You could do just as well, only you are always abandoning your work." he means it, the sincerity clear in his voice; he is no good at all at dissembling. _how wearying it is_, Napier thinks unfairly, feeling a little old, _to be believed in._ his mother has always believed in her children so strongly that as a young boy he sometimes wondered whether there were other, realer versions of them all somewhere, more deserving of all that fierce faith than were his ordinaryish siblings. before his brother died, at least, and made himself permanently extraordinary.

he finds there is a great safety in vanity. "You have drawn yourself as Brocken, so you must draw me next."  
"Who shall you be?"  
"Whosoever your heart desires."

if Rex looks stricken, he barely notices.

the drawing appears the following day; Napier as Annabel Lee, a death-pale vision. "Why, W," he says, utterly enchanted, "You have drawn me dead again."  
"You like it," Rex answers with a shocking note in his voice; something unprecedented, a dark shadow that only enthralls him further, "When I draw you dead."  
"Yes." the word sounds sibilant; over the silence that follows, he pictures a kestrel, hovering, waiting.

"You make me very beautiful," he continues eventually, and Rex makes a sudden, small, wrenched sound and says, "God, you _are_ beautiful."

**Author's Note:**

> tune in another time for countryside larks, fantasies about dead brides and snake venom, gallivanting in Switzerland and on the Riviera, Cecil Beaton (maybe), I don't actually know whether I am going to write any more of this


End file.
